Barbie review: A funny, self-satirising and moving story about a doll with real heart
Margot Robbie is brilliantly cast as Barbie
★★★★☆
Not even Barbie (12A) is immune to existential crises.
Amid all the pastel perfection of Barbieland, Barbie (Margot Robbie) suddenly can’t stop thinking about dying. The problem, Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) tells her, is that whoever is playing with Barbie in the Real World is experiencing the kind of sad thoughts that are plaguing our heroine.
Determined to make things right, Barbie sets out for the Real World with Ken (Ryan Gosling) in tow, only to discover that she is by no means a feminist role model who has helped women to live their best lives.
Worse, Ken discovers the patriarchy, and decides that it’s time that all the Kens of Barbieland take a stand and demand their manly rights …
Written by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, with Gerwig directing, Barbie is a movie that wants to have it both ways: an ironic celebration of Barbie and her idyllic world, it’s also a satire on the impossible ideal she represents for young girls (Barbie, declares the disaffected real-world teenager Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), is not only ‘fascist’ but ‘sexualised capitalism’).
And for the most part, it manages to get the blend right: Ryan Gosling is delightfully ludicrous as the preening, insecure Ken, while Kate McKinnon is a hoot as Weird Barbie, who bears all the scars – burnt hair, dubious make-up – of a doll who has been played with too much out in the Real World.
At the heart of the film, Margot Robbie is brilliantly cast, both as the superficially beautiful clothes-horse and the thoughtful, occasionally profound doll who finally learns to cry. Funny, self-satirising and genuinely moving on occasion, Barbie is a toy story about a doll with real heart.
(cinema release)
